for reasons we can't fathom
by acetamide
Summary: The world ends. Jim and Bones cope.


Written for the following prompt at the LJ st_xi_kink meme:

_Iowa Kirk/Bones on a farm _

* * *

_for reasons we can't fathom_

_***_

The end of the world comes fast and silent and dark, and nobody is prepared for it.

***

It's a culmination of events, several celestial tragedies merging to form one nightmare that grows and consumes the planet.

The explosion of Procyon has been predicted for several decades by the time it happens, and yet somehow nobody is ready for it. The star goes supernova mid-February – or at least that's what's being said. In truth nobody knows, because by the time the shockwave and the heat and the light reach the Earth, any witnesses were burnt to ash and cast into oblivion.

As the explosion rips through space it envelops nearly one hundred and fifty starships – and whilst the rest of the fleet is engaged halfway across the galaxy, the home solar system crumbles with nobody to help.

***

When the explosion happens, nearly all of the crew is on shore leave, and Joanna has just turned twelve. Bones had bartered for an intricate weather device when they were on Risa a few months previously and he's packaged the gift carefully, and he's carrying it in his arms when the step off the shuttle.

The shockwave hits with the force of a thousand bombs and knocks both Jim and Bones off their feet and makes their teeth ache, and Joanna's present is shattered before it hits the ground.

***

It takes nearly a week, but Ambassador Spock manages to get his hands some decalithium – and normally Jim would want to know how the hell he managed that but all he wants now is to get that stuff up there and in there and _stop this_, because it's only a matter of time before the supernova expands and begins to drag the solar system in.

The black hole forms overhead as Bones starts shouting, and Jim coerces Joanna into going outside with him so she doesn't have to witness her parents fighting. She doesn't seem to mind that her birthday present was destroyed – she seems happier for her father's presence than any broken gift he brought with him.

Jim first contacts Spock and Uhura, then Sulu, then Chekov, and then Scotty, as Joanna plays with the dog on the grass and the light disappears from the sky.

***

The electromagnetic pulse a few days later is more powerful than anything that Earth is able to withstand, and the planet is plunged into darkness. The back-up generators that have been designed to light the cities up again lay smoking in their basements.

The shuttle that they're travelling in crashes ten miles over the border into Iowa. There's hardly any warning – just a brief flash of light, and then they tumble from the sky. Jim doesn't let go of Bones' hand as they're bashed around inside the sturdy metal cage, buckled in tight and the people around them are screaming even as they slow to a stop.

It takes Bones nearly two hours to get everybody patched up, and then they start walking.

There's not even static on the communicators. There's just nothing.

***

The early March wind is cold as they trudge along the road, whipping around their necks and ankles. Jim's lost count of the blisters he's gained – he's just concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other and not losing track of Bones as the light fades and they're still a mile off the nearest town.

There are fire burning in the distance, and that's where they're headed. Jim knows that if Uhura were with them, she'd say something about them being beacons of hope, and Bones would grouch about her being sentimental and Jim would laugh.

But she's not, and they don't. They just keep walking.

***

The starships that have returned since Procyon never reach Earth – they're just five parsecs away when the pulse hurtles through their systems. The people down on the ground don't even know that the ships had been coming to save them until one of them falls into the Atlantic Ocean, its crew already among the dead.

Jim's sat out on the step in front of some old woman's house in a random town in the waning sunlight when the news reaches them, a young boy shouting about it as he runs into the town, and he's violently sick in amongst the marigolds.

***

The farm is abandoned when they finally get there.

Jim isn't sure how long it's been standing empty – a few months, years maybe? And then he realises with a jolt that he has no idea where his mother is. He doesn't even know if she was on the planet, he hasn't spoken to her in that long.

"Bones," he whispers, staring at the front door with its sun-bleached, peeling paint. "My mom."

And that's all he needs to say, because Bones always knows exactly what he's trying to say even if he doesn't. There's a warm hand on his shoulder, and if nothing else Bones is _there_, and that's enough.

"Don't assume the worst," he says quietly, giving Jim a little shake. "Just don't."

***

It's been years, but Jim still knows his way around. Any food that's left has gone off, so he unearths his old bicycle from the barn and sends Bones to the nearest shops to buy food. The cows are still there and seem to be surviving fine by themselves, but the crops have failed and the earth is barren.

He thinks of the last time he saw the people that he _knows_, other than Bones. A month ago, his crew had been in good spirits when they had left the Enterprise at the space dock. It hadn't felt right, leaving her there, but he'd shaken himself and boarded the shuttle with the rest of them. It must have been how Joanna felt the night that they left, holding so tightly onto Bones that she looked as though she was trying to sink into his chest. Jocelyn had pulled her away after she refused to let go, and Jim could see that Bones was trying so hard not to cry.

He tries to watch TV whilst he waits for Bones, but it's not working. Nothing is, even the lights, so he starts a fire in the main room and searches in the attic for some of his books from when he was a kid, and he curls up in front of the fire under a rug to read.

He doesn't remember falling asleep, but he wakes to the sound of Bones shifting around in the kitchen just next door. It's dark outside – but then, it hasn't been properly light since the black hole was created and now that nothing works, it feels even darker.

He's drifting off again when Bones climbs onto the sofa, sliding under the rug and wrapping himself around Jim. He smells of wind and earth and wood and so much of _home_ that Jim's chest aches, and he closes his eyes and pretends that it's all just a dream.

***

"How long?"

Bones shrugs from where he's sat on the swinging bench as Jim leans against the doorframe, looking out across the fields. Jim's not sure what he means by the question, but that's okay.

"Until the Federation gets its ass into gear and comes to help?" Bones clarifies, and the set of his face and the tone of his voice is almost normal enough to make Jim smile. "I don't know. It could be tomorrow, or it could be months from now. It depends on how much they know of our situation."

"But there must be someone hanging around, someone near enough to have seen the fucking supernova and black hole," Jim growls, walking to sit beside Bones, and the bench groans under his weight. "Someone must have noticed that something's going on."

"There was someone. But the EMP got them."

Jim lets his head drop and braces his forearms on his knees. This is what their home planet has been reduced to. Nobody notices it, and nobody is helping it. It's slowly dying and nobody knows.

***

They've limited their trips into town to once a week, because it's always chaos. The men are fighting and stealing, there's children crying in the streets, and once a young woman recognised Jim. His face was all over the news after the incident with Nero so it's not surprising – but she had launched herself at him in a whirl of fury, beating at him with thin arms and blaming him for not helping.

She didn't do much damage – just a bruise and some scratches – but her outburst spurs the town into believing that Starfleet have abandoned the planet, and soon they're met with simmering loathing whenever they appear.

Jim wants to tell them that they're wrong, the Federation hasn't abandoned them.

But he's not sure he believes it himself.

***

Bones catches him trying to leave at two in the morning, and drags him back into the house with a tight grip on his wrist, shouting and cursing all the way. He throws Jim's bag onto the kitchen table and empties it, gesturing wildly with at the broken communicator and the PADD and everything else, raging until his cheeks are flushed and his hair is standing on end.

But Jim's not listening. The planet is helpless and he needs to _do_ something, anything, to feel as though he's not just watching as mankind fades.

***

It's April before it's warm enough to not have to sleep in front of the fire, and Jim nearly offers to make up the guest room for Bones. He's not sure what's acceptable – he can't sleep in the bed that his mother and stepfather shared for years before they disappeared, and his own bed is a single that was barely big enough for him when he was younger.

But when night falls, they push and pull and somehow fit together on the rickety single bed, memories of Jim's childhood surrounding them and pressing urgent kisses into each other's skin.

The rest of the house empty but right now, there's enough life right here in this room to keep Jim going for a while yet.

***

Jim wakes in the middle of the night to find the rest of the bed empty and the window open, a gentle breeze ruffling his hair.

He climbs out onto the roof and curls into Bones' side, breathing in against his neck and fanning his hand out over his ribs.

"Do you think they'll move us to another planet? New Earth?"

Jim shrugs as best as he can when he's pressed into Bones' side, and suppresses a yawn.

"I hope not. I kinda like Earth."

"Jim, there's an unstable black hole half a parsec away from the planet. We could fall into the ergosphere at any time, and then we'd be an endangered species just like the Vulcans. Why would you want to stay here?"

"Because as much as I may have hated it when I was a kid, it's my home. It's your home too."

"No. It's not," Bones says simply, and turns his head to look at Jim.

***

Jim gasps into Bones' neck as another star burns out above them, and he squeezes his eyes shut as Bones' name falls soundlessly from his lips.

***

As April rolls into May, there are a few weeks when the hole's accretion disk begins to pull at Sirius and the resulting gas jet burns bright enough that Jim barely sleeps and Bones straps a pair of enormous sunglasses to his face. Jim mocks him, says that he's trying to get down with the kids, and Bones tells him that if he wants to damage his own eyesight then that's fine but he'd be damned if he's going to spend the next few years as Jim's personal guide dog.

When Jim next goes out to milk the herd, he wears a pair of his father's old aviators and when he gets back some of the tension eases from Bones' shoulders.

***

The sky above is heavy with rain and heat, simmering in the clouds as the thunderstorm brews. The good thing about summer, Jim decides, is that it means they don't have to wrap up warm and they can put off lighting the candles until later on in the evening.

He looks over to where Bones is writing another letter to Joanna, perched on the front steps and resting on his knee. This is the sixth letter that he'll have written since they settled in, and Jim knows that once he's finished it'll go in the drawer along with all of the others and his daughter will never see it.

When he had written his first letter, Jim had offered to take it into town the next morning when he went for groceries. But Bones had just looked up at him, sighed, and told him that he didn't know the address to send it to.

That night, it had been Bones that needed to be rocked and soothed as he mourned someone that he hadn't even lost.

***

Four months, one week, and two days after the explosion, Jim's communicator makes a strangled, squawking noise for two seconds.

It's one of the best things that Jim Kirk has heard in his life.

***

It seems that being a Starfleet Captain still makes you important no matter how far to hell your planet's gone, so it's only ten minutes into the evacuation when Jim is allowed to access the shuttle's system. The computer is cold and bright and efficient under his fingers and damn, if he hasn't missed this.

He searches through the registry that's connected to all of the shuttles that landed on the surface, checking names and ranks and keeps searching.

There's no Sulu. There's no Chekov. There's no Spock.

For the first time since this began it's no longer a fear that one of them didn't make it through the planet's breakdown, that the shockwave collapsed a building on top of them or the pulse took out the shuttle that they were travelling in.

Now, it's just a cold, hard fact.

Jim finds himself sat on the floor in front of the whole shuttle and they stare at him as dry sobs rack his body and he releases all of the tension that he's been holding for four months.

***

"I thought you wanted to stay," Bones says as the shuttle leaves the atmosphere, exiting on the opposite side to the black hole. The Enterprise was destroyed in the explosion and so all of their possessions are packed into a few duffel bags between them.

Jim's cheek is nearly pressed against the window as he watches the Earth disappear beneath them, but the other side of his body is pressed right up against Bones, against that reassuring warmth.

"Not much point when I would have been the only one on the planet," he says ruefully, tearing his eyes away long enough to twitch a half-smile at Bones, and something the other man's eyes makes his breath catch.

"I would have stayed with you. Like you said, it was your home."

They've already spoken to everyone that they know. They're meeting Uhura and Scotty when they dock, so that they can grieve properly. Bones spoke to Jocelyn and for the first time that Jim can remember, he didn't sound angry. He just sounded tired as he arranged to see them.

Now, Bones is looking at him with a really intense expression on his face and even though he's exhausted and ready to fall apart, Jim can see that he's holding it all together for him. Because somehow, Bones knows that if he can't hold Jim up, they'll both fall back down to Earth.

Jim smiles, a real smile this time, and thinks he can see it reflected in Bones' weary face.

"I was wrong."

_***_

_end._

_***_


End file.
